Multi-Disciplinary Artist

More Blender Experiments

Over the past six months I have been developing my skills with Blender in the hopes of being able to translate my models into real life art objects using unusual materials. At the moment it’s mostly just visual experimentation although I have considered materials and methods for the construction of these pieces.

In these two images I experimented with having a multi-coloured sphere light inside a waxy shell. Playing with the shaders in Blender is pretty fun.

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I really like this star shape. This was mostly just about playing with shaders again though. At this time I found myself ending up with a lot of objects with five way symmetry.

This was my first attempt at modelling a head using Blender’s sculpting mode. I ran into some issues when it came to texturing it because it was made of too many faces to unwrap. The solution is to make a head made of less faces and then project the detailed one onto your new simplified low poly model as a normal map, which creates the illusion of complicated geometry. I haven’t tried this yet.

These were two of the first things I made where I painted textures on them. The pyramid one I painted in Blender directly onto the model and then put the texture through Crazy Bump to get a normal map, which gave it the damaged rubber looking surface.

The one on the right I played with Blender’s liquid physics and had fluid run out of my object.The physics are a little bit glitchy in Blender so so there’s a little bit of weirdness.

This is my first attempt to use Hexels to create textures for my models. It’s a program that lets you draw with tessellating shapes.

I made this guy afterwards. I think it’s a bit more successful than the other one.

With this thing I was experimenting with using a black and white imageto determine the materials of an object. Without doing this you can only assign the material type to the triangles the model is made of, but with this you can draw onto the model which parts are which material, which allowed me to paint those gold blobs on the front and add the swirl. Also putting that through Crazy Bumps let me create normal maps which creates the illusion of the gold parts being indented in.

I added more details to this blobby monstrosity just so I could try out samples of different patterns and see how they look with normal maps added. I also figured out how to do ambient occlusion which simulates the way less light gets into crevices on objects, but I struggled to implement it very well on a glossy surface.

These are more visual experiments. The cube with the corners was particularly about getting more familiar with how to make more complicated objects out of multiple pieces.

This was using a black and white image to determine materials which allowed me to scribble glass material onto a rough glass/translucent mix material so you get a steamed up glass effect on the surfaces.